God Complex
by Color Me Berserk
Summary: Tanya was just a dirt poor orphan until she discovered her magick potential. Now the doors of military service in a meritocracy open up for her and give her access to a life she previously thought impossible. Follow this young girl as she uses her only valuable skill, namely killing people, to carve out her place in the world.
1. Chapter 1

**AN: Got bored and busted this sucker out in an hour while waiting for my free copy of Destiny 2 to download.**

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God Complex

 **HUNGRY**

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I learned from a young age that the easiest way to get what you want is to kill someone who has it and take it from them.

Growing up in an orphanage was hard. The empire did not allocate state money for them like other nations did, so everything from food to clothing was hard for us to come by. The nuns tried their hardest to keep us clothed and fed and there were plenty of locals willing to donate their time to help us keep a roof over our heads, but life was hard none the less.

Most mornings we would wake up to no food for us to eat, clothes filled with holes that do nothing to keep you warm, and constant work day in and day out just with the hope that someday down the line we will have something to _finally_ eat.

It was a regular occurrence for the larger, most physically endowed children to "appropriate" things from the meeker quieter ones. The nuns for the most part ignored these altercations as long as they did not occur inside the church proper. They had more important things to worry about, and spent all their spare time trying to get a hundred rowdy children to follow them along in prayer so they had neither the time, nor the inclination to nip the cruelty in the bud before it could escalate.

It wasn't anything too violent most of the time. We were after all young children. Mostly it was just vague childish threats of violence and grabbing food from others hands before they could react. There were a few bad eggs, but they were woefully outnumbered by ones who simply wanted to get by without any more troubles.

Unless we went outside and intermingled with the rats living in the city. Then we had to play by their rules.

Unfortunately, due to my dislike for interacting with others, most would label me in the second group. They considered me prey. Someone to take advantage of without fear of retaliation.

My small size might also have been a contributing factor. I have always been a slight girl, even after extensive training. Malnourishment did not compliment this.

And according to the many military doctors I have been forced to visit over the years, it may have been the contributing factor to my pitiful size.

One of the many faceless children at the orphanage took it upon himself to make my life as miserable as he possibly could. Day in and day out, he would annoy me, push me down, steal my food, and in general make a nuisance of himself at every opportunity.

It was around this moment I learned the importance of having a unit of trusted compatriots and friends to defend you and leverage your abilities as a group towards common ends. All the other children, be them in the orphanage or the homeless street rats from the city we would occasionally interact with, organized themselves into tight knit groups that functioned together as teams.

I did not have a group, and before I knew it I was branded an outsider by everyone else and was unable to form any connections with the other children.

Everyone else had a person that had their back if push came to shove. Some littles followed the bigs around for protection. Others went out stealing together, some keeping watch while others nick whatever they could get their grubby little hands on.

Even in the orphanage I was alone. Forced by circumstances instead of faith to follow the nuns around like a loyal dog hoping for scraps. Unable to keep any food of my own from grabbing hands I required the nuns charity to keep me alive.

I could, and did, go out and pilfer food on my own on occasion. The danger from doing it alone, along with the risk of other hungry rats ambushing me and taking it immediately made it too risky an endeavor to do unless absolutely necessary.

I couldn't even keep any property of my own in the orphanage like the other kids. Being a loner, anything I left out of my sight would instantly be snapped up and horded by the kids in their groups. Getting them back once they were taken was an impossibility, which I quickly learned after a few beatings.

Eventually however, I learned how to take care of myself.

One hot day in mid-summer in my 7th year in this world I was once again starving for food. The orphanage was doing worse than ever and food was almost nonexistent. The little child-like part of my mind was thoroughly entertained for a few minutes a day with the realization that I can count my ribs through my skin just by looking, the more rational part I relied on was terrified by the knowledge that I could waste away and die any day.

So, without any other options I left the orphanage and journeyed into the main city in search of food.

The city had changed quite a bit over my short life. More glowing lights showing the popularization of electricity to cut through the cloying dust and smog that always blanketed the city when the winds were not favorable. A few children when I was even younger died from lung problems exacerbated by the horrendous air quality in the city.

Killed by your lungs. What a pitiful way to go.

The biggest change other than the lights and smell, was of course the people. At some point, for whatever reason, the nationalism the Empire is known for has gone to new heights never before seen. I assume any outsider who did not know of our nations tumultuous history would never guess that just a few decades ago the entire empire was a rag tag band of small micronations at war with each other almost constantly.

Already, so recently united, the people of the Empire were preparing themselves to war once again. This time not for land, or to dominate the other Germanic peoples, but to simply prove their superiority to the massive nations around us. To prove that our industry and military might was infinitely superior to the long-standing centuries old nations that have looked down on us for so long.

Almost every weak there were nationalist rallies urging the people to action. Ordering the citizens of the Empire to prepare themselves for the coming assault by the evil lesser nations surrounding us.

Unknown to them, the other countries were holding similar rallies demonizing us.

People really are stupid creatures.

I did not care for these rallies as a child. They were noisy affairs, attended by people who cared too much about things that don't matter. After all, why worry about a failing militant empire to the west when you don't know if you will starve to death by the weekend?

What the rallies did provide, for a rat like me, was an ample amount of cover and distraction. The rallies regularly got out of hand which meant the shop owners minding their stalls would be focused on the grown men marching through the streets shouting their nonsense and waving their hastily made signs and banners.

That or looking on in politics fueled glee at the passion of this great empire's citizenry!

Or whatever it is the newspapers said about it. I took to reading the papers the nuns left lying around when I finally figured out how and it had long sense become a habit.

Despite the overall poor quality of writing.

At least they burned well enough to drive out the cold.

The long day of pilfering and thievery was a good one. I went about unseen among the large crowds and made off with half a loaf of bread, some sort of a citrus, and a stick of some sort of cooked meat.

What I should have done is hide someplace where no one could find me and slowly pace myself through the food over the next few days to prevent vomiting it back up or giving myself refeeding syndrome and shutting down my tiny heart.

Instead I did what any overly excitable child would do and ran back to the orphanage as fast as my little legs could carry me.

Why I decided to go directly to the place filled to the brim with people I neither like nor trust I will never know.

Upon entering the large ramshackle building attached to an old church, I immediately realized my mistake. The other children had also been starving, not to the same degree as myself, but more than enough to make them willing to take drastic measures to obtain food. Normally the children inside the orphanage were milder than the street rats and less likely to... bite, but these kids were starving to death, same as me.

Not exactly the same, they were also much larger than me.

I do not remember the name of the child who followed me to my corner in the attic where I usually chose to sleep. He was one of the taller orphanage kids, bulky around the shoulders from whatever puberty he somehow managed to squeak out between periods of starvation. He had the awkward middle size of someone too old and tall to be a little and too small to be a big. His group of rats were all in similar states, not big enough to be intimidating or strong enough for actual work, but too big to go unnoticed when stealing from the city folk.

I was just getting ready to chow down into my illegally obtained meal when he stomped up the rickety ladder. Immediately my mind went into overdrive. I was in a worst-case scenario, I had something that someone bigger than me wanted, and I was in the attic alone.

The big oaf at least had the decency to look around and make sure there were no witnesses before stomping over and threatening me.

I did not want to give the boy the food. After all, I was the one who did the work to obtain it, why in god's name would I ever give it over for nothing?

So I did something I had never done before in my short life, I fought back.

When the boy roughly grabbed the loaf of bread from my hands, I leapt at him with all the force a malnourished 7-year-old girl could muster. Any self-respecting adult could have easily fended me off, but this boy was no healthy grown up. He was just another sickly rat, same as me.

I did my best to pummel the boy as much as I could, but the bigger boy regained his wits almost immediately and back handed me across the face, sending me tumbling back head first into the wall. The oaf was upon me instantly, slamming his fists into me over and over again. Each blow felt like a rock hitting my skull.

I could hardly breath with the boys' weight on my chest. For the first time in my life I genuinely thought that their, in that crummy church attic, with this oaf on top of me, I was going to die.

And when that thought shot through my head, something changed.

Deep inside of me, a glorious warmth spread through my body. It spread out from my center to every little corner of my body, easing my aches and clearing my vision. The familiar aches in my bones diminished until they were almost unnoticeable, and each fist impacting my face felt more like a gnat was attacking me.

It was the first time my Magick came to me, and it was wonderful.

I was still a scrawny little girl, but now with magick flowing through my veins I easily through the boy off of me and hit him again and again.

The rage, so pure and unfiltered I felt in that moment as I punched that cretins face until it resembled ground meat was like a raging torment ripping through my body. I don't know how long I pounded on him before he passed into the next world, or how much longer after that I beat his mangled corpse until it was completely unrecognizable.

I only remember afterwards, staring down at his body as blood dripped from my bruised knuckles.

For the first time in my life, that hollow, hungering in my stomach was barely noticeable.

Somehow, standing their covered from head to toe in blood, I was genuinely happy.

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 **Welcome to the bottom!**

 **So this was pretty much a random impulse write, and it was quite fun. Youjo Senki is one of my favorite... anime/ln/manga and i had been meaning to write something for it for quite some time now.**

 **In case anyone was confused, the POV in this chapter is Yanya as a kid. This is going to pretty much be an AU where Tanya is just a genius psychopath with no reincarnation involved. Reincarnation, while it is one of my favorite tropes in typical fantasy (probably because I liked Wheel of Time so much), is one of my least favorite things in pretty much every other circumstance so i wanted to just run through the story without it and see what I come up with.**

 **Not much to say with this.**

 **I dont have schedules for my uploads, i have like 6 stories running atm and just post immediately after finishing a chapter, which I write as soon as I feel the motivation. Most likely their will be a chapter every week or so, unless of course I get bored and write chapters back to back like I have been known to do, in which case their might be bursts of one a day for a few days.**

 **So before anyone complains about whatever people complain about, this is an AU. I will be changing some things. Nothing too major to the overall world state. Still basically magical world war 1 and a half. Mostly just changing a bit of details for the magic system, removing reincarnation, and Being X will be much more low key.**

 **Also Tanya will be getting one hell of a god complex.**


	2. Chapter 2

**Heyo, welcome to a new chapter. Would have taken an hour or two to bust this puppy out sooner, but my Grandma is visiting for the month for the first time in ages so i have been going around doing stuff with her. It so much fun to listen to her crazy outdated opinions on things!**

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God Complex: Chapter 02: Life After Death

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A comrade of mine used to go on and on about the universal force of karma. That everything you do pays forward, good for good, bad for bad. I always viewed his beliefs similarly to the nuns from the orphanage, or really anything else in my life.

If I see no evidence to support a belief, and only evidence against, then in all likely hood it is not true.

On occasion however, I would humor the man and live my life according to karma. This was not atypical of me, on occasion I would try my hardest to adjust my worldview, if only for a minute, in search of that personal satisfaction people seem to obtain through blind faith and belief.

Though I must admit, rubbing it in his face when I proved him wrong was also quite pleasant.

The burning heat of victory was all I was able to get. The passionate glee from proving one's superiority over someone else, making them lift the scales from their eyes and challenge their own view on the world is quite a wonderful feeling. That golden flame that alights in the hearts and eyes of the truly faithful, that drives them to passionate action beyond their ken is a beautiful sight to behold, and something I have never been able to truly obtain.

Although I did fake it on occasion.

And in hindsight, karma might have bitten me in the ass over that one.

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As a child I had a very deep understanding of fear. Orphans have next to no protection from the worse parts of society, later on in life these types of people, those without real connections of supervision would be defined as "high risk" for predation. Every so often one of the other children would simply vanish into thin air. No one knew what happened to them, and no one had the time or the motivation to search for a orphan in the middle of a city.

But those days after killing that boy over some food were terrifying. My first days in combat, the sound of artillery slowly closing in on your position, the hiss of a bullet passing by your skull, all pale in comparison to the all-encompassing terror that I felt.

Who can really blame me? I was just a kid.

That first night went by in a haze. Somehow, I managed to dispose of the body without being seen and wash my blood sodden hands.

I don't remember much of those first few hours.

My first solid memory after staring at the dead boy's body was late in the night. I was curled up in a ball and shaking like a newborn calf. The food I was so ravenous for earlier was trying its damnedest to force its way back out my throat with such fervor I had to clamp my hands over my mouth with a death grip just to keep myself from getting ill.

All night I was like that.

Shaking.

Eyes wide and unblinking.

Just waiting.

What for?

I wasn't entirely sure.

Keep in mind, I was raised in a church by a bunch of very passionate nuns who did their best to instill the fear of god into me. Without the knowledge or context for what they were telling me, I could not read between the lines for what they really were, simply stories with morals to keep ancient societies from ripping themselves apart.

I fully expected at any moment for a bolt of lightning to rip across the heavens and send me to hell to suffer for all eternity.

And yet, as the night went on, despite all my beliefs on the truth of the world.

Not a god damned thing happened.

I woke up the next morning when the rising sun made the attic too hot to be comfortable in, curled around my remaining food.

I cannot truly communicate the amount of shock I was in. When I closed my eyes at last that night, I expected the next time I opened them to be staring into the flames of hell. Certainly not for me to wake up hungry as ever with arms filled with the food I had killed for.

It was quite the revelation.

Or as close to a world-shattering revelation you can get as a seven-year-old brat.

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The weeks passed much better after my first magical flare up.

It took a surprising amount of effort to force even the smallest amount of the strange blue mist from my body, and even more to actually make it _do_ anything useful other than just float their meaninglessly. I didn't have the training or the resources to learn myself how to use my newfound abilities so I was left with the only other option.

Trial and error.

A frankly incredible amount of error.

My first attempts to actually bend the uncooperative force to my will went about as well as could be expected. I pushed the mist from my hands until I had a sizable amount floating in front of me and _commanded_ it with all the fervor a kid can muster.

Only to immediately be disappointed when it all amounted to a single spark flickering in the air between my palms.

At least, I should have been. Anyone would have been saddened that all their effort had such a puny, nothing of a result.

But to my little self?

That spark floating between my hands was the most incredible thing in the world.

To me, that little meaningless glow represented every part of me. I was a nobody with no family, no friends, nothing to call my own until that moment. In that instant, when I forced my will on the world and bent it to my needs, I got my first look at true power. This thing between my hands had the potential to take me farther in life than anything the world had ever given me, and from that moment I forgot about the corpse I left in the woods, forgot the orphanage and the hunger.

All I could think of was using this wondrous magic.

And so, I did.

The next year, all the way up until my eighth "birthday", if you could call it that seeing as it was merely the day I was left at the orphanage as a baby, i practiced day in and day out. Every waking moment I was pushing this strange power through my body and thinking of new things to do with it.

I couldn't do much. Just enough to keep myself warm and fed through the winter and protect myself from other urchins.

My eighth birthday was something special. It was around that age where magic begins to present itself in a child at detectable levels, so the government would send testing crews around to all the orphanages they could, and often set themselves up in public for general testing, and see if they could find anyone with the gift of magic.

It just so happened that my eighth birthday was the day before they came to our ramshackle church.

What a strange coincidence.

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"Next up is..." The greasy looking bald man checks his clip board for what must have been the thousandth time that morning. How the empires meritocracy let such an incompetent moron in charge of something as important as finding children with magical potential I will never know. I'm just thankful he wasn't like some of those worthless snobs that would try to hide and under report any lower-class kids with magic.

That's much more of a problem in the Allied Kingdom I'm told. Must be terrible living in such a rigid class system.

Poor bastards.

"Tanya Degurechaff." The man called out as if it was necessary. I was the only one left to be tested and was already standing directly in front of the man.

So, I pretty much just stood in front of the big potato headed slug man and stared up at him, waiting for him to notice me.

He kept looking at his clip board for almost a minute before finally looking up from it and surveying the room. No doubt he was expecting one of the other children who already were sat down in the tables behind me to have a hand raised or something.

I certainty did not hold it against him that he was just looking directly over my head.

If he survived the war, I am going to find him and cut his legs off.

"Sir!" I squeaked out. I did not mention before, but I am not a very talkative person. This was even more so as a child where I did not have any friends or associates.

Talking to strangers for extended periods, as embarrassing as it is to say, was difficult for me.

So I kept it short.

The man finally noticed me and didn't say a word, simply stepping to the side and patting the stool I was to sit on.

"Simple stuff Miss Degurechaff." said the man as he plopped a heavy metal helmet covered in enough wires to modernize a house, "The alignment crystals will take care of the heavy lifting, just focus on trying to make something happen."

With the benefit of hindsight i can say the man should have including more instructions, because I do not think he expected what happened next.

I closed my eyes as hard as I could and poured more effort into making the magic happen than I ever had before. I did not know the requirements to pass the test, so I gave it everything i had.

BANG!

The cold metal helmet flashed to burning hot in an instant and exploded away from my head sending shrapnel and molten metal blasting through the ceiling like a shotgun blast.

I opened my eyes in time to see the other children stare at me in wide eyed awe, the nuns hold onto them protectively, and the potato headed idiot drop his clip board.

It was only months later, when I was already in the middle of training my magical abilities in a classroom of other prospective battle mages that I was informed that performing magic without a conduit of some sort is almost impossible.

Needless to say, I was quite pleased with the results of the test.

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Life moved fast after that.

No one felt the need to inform me of anything going on in my life until a few days later when I was taken from the orphanage by a military truck and taken to the training facility outside of Berun for the Imperial Military mages.

It turned out, as an orphan, I did not have the right of self-determination in the Empire.

Immediately upon receiving the reports of my innate magical abilities the military simply used their powers to take me away to learn how to use it.

Sure, there was the possibility that my magical talents would be in something mundane that would not have application to a military life, but someone with my potential would be useful wherever my skill sets lay.

You see, despite what the average Hans on the street thinks, magic isn't a catch all thing. Every person's abilities from the moment they start using it leans towards one kind or the other.

Some people are naturally good at healing magic, and will be rubbish at combat spells no matter how hard they try. Historically those were called healing mages, or more recently, medic mages.

Alternatively, it could be the opposite, with someone leaning towards combat magic. Those are referred to as battle mages.

Or as they are used now a days in the military, air mages.

Presumably because they fly so much.

There are other types of course, dozens of varieties depending on where in the world you live, but that two are the kinds the Imperial Military cares for.

The more medic mages you have, the less significant casualties are to your ability to fight. The more battle mages you have, the more firepower you can bring to bear upon the enemy.

How gifted a mage varies wildly as well. Most medic mages can only heal a few people from deaths door a day without risking their own lives, but hundreds of years ago when the great plagues sweat through the continent a healing mage from Parisii cured the entire plague in an instant.

Not in a single patient mind you, he cured every single living thing on the planet of the plague.

Most of these extreme cases don't have special names to go along with their incredible feats, mostly just the individuals and their achievements are remembered, save for two types.

Holy Mages, those "blessed by god" to go far beyond their normal abilities in a time of need like Joan of Arc. The single young girl managed to fight a dozen veteran english mages to a standstill without any training.

And lastly would be War Mages.

War Mages are unlike the other mages because historically they have changed the world every time they appeared. It is assumed that any country with one will be in a perpetual state of war until the mage either dies, or simply grows tired of fighting and retires. Because of this, every nation is on the look out trying to find battle mages of their own that might be potential war mages, along with spying on their neighbors to make sure they do not have one either.

And if they do, to try their hardest to kill them before they grow into a threat.

Napoleon had a War Mage by his side and won victory after victory until the man was assassinated by the combined efforts of the Allied Kingdom and a fledgling Empire.

The United States, of all modern nations, has had the most luck with getting War Mages. George Washington practically built the country with his own two hands after all and single handedly sunk half the Allied Kingdom ships blockading Boston. The lucky bastards even managed to have three, THREE of the damned things at once when they weren't at war!

The entire planet was terrified that the new world power would send their invincible mages to invade their country, yet they didn't. The mages were content with life in the United States frontier fighting the natives.

Although Buffalo Bill did cross the pond and put on a few shows every so often.

Needless to say, War Mages were incredibly rare, usually, baring those thick-headed Americans good luck, only popping up once a century.

Being so rare, my time in the military, if I was even eventually drafted, would be happily peaceful knowing there aren't any incredibly powerful harbingers of chaos and destruction flying about trying to invade everything that moves.

It certainly would have made my life easier if that turned out to be true.

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 **Welcome to the bottom!**

 **This chapter is kind of... split up, i guess is a good way to describe it. My first little scribbling had a lot more stuff with her at the orphanage for the year before her testing, but it wasn't really meaningful and just kinda dragged for ages.**

 **As you have no doubt noticed, I changed some magical lore and shit. I figure in this version the golden eyed lunatics will all be holy mages, like modern Joan of Arcs, and Tanya will be a War Mage that pretends to be a holy mage so people dont try as hard to assassinate her in her sleep.**

 **No doubt at many points in this story i will fuck up the names of the countries and their cities. I called Allied Kingdom "Britain" and United Kingdom like 500 times in my first draft of the damned thing, so no doubt i will continue to fuck it up, especially when Japan gets thrown into the mix.**

 **As for long term goals for this... alot of my thinking has been going into how to have the empire last a long time against such overwealming odds. Italy, or whatever the fuck it is called in the YS universe, isnt a central power, nor is the Ottoman Empire, so the Empire should run into the same oil and manpower problems Germany did in World War 2. So far my main thing is just keeping the United States out of the war by distracting them with Japan, since being in the 1920 without nuclear bombs, American would have to invade mainland Japan, which would be pretty fucking insane and intense fighting for ages and drain incredibly resources.**

 **If you have any recommendations for this I can change or improve compared to the show, or have just random suggestions/corrections/concerns/whatever you feel like yelling at me, please tell me.**

 **Oh, and for anyone wondering, while writing this i was watching "Military History Visualized". Nothing makes me want ot write a Nazi Loli than listening to a german accent talk about Panzer tanks.**

 **Onto the reviews!**

 **Deathstrokenorris" Thanks for wishing me luck! And yeah, keeping her from being Mary Sue will likely be a pain in the ass. I enjoyed the scene in the anime where they essentially get "Dunkirk"ed and she is frustrated she could have won, and i enjoyed seeing her like that and i enjoy tortuting my characters, so i will likely have her fail often enough.**

 **And hell, if i have the time i may even give her a personality.**

 **Lewascan2: Thanks! Since i have no "Maguffin" in the form of being X to create things like the type 95 the same way it happens in the original, as you can see i had to make some significant changes to make Tanya strong enough to not just be an average mage. Pretty much alot of the conflict will be that as long as Tanya is alive (once they figure out she is a war mage) the world will always be at war, either the empire starting it because they can win, or other countries trying to prevent them from taking over the planet. Kind of like all the nations banding together to fuck up Napoleon.**

 **And yeah, fighting people blessed by god and coming out on top is one heck of a way to build yourself up ahahaha.**

 **Mogami Kumagawa: these types of plots are pretty much the first thing i think of when i see reincarnation stories. Such a shame "hey lets remove the gimmick and just enjoy the weird world and characters" fics aren't so common. Cause the main reason im writing this is because i want to read it hahaha.**

 **And thats all folks!**

 **I hope you enjoyed, or at least didn't hate it. The Pacing in this one is definitely worse than the first chapter due to how broken up it was, but i really want to get the exposition and set up out of the way to get into the actual... you know. plot and shit.**

 **If "plot and shit" is not already the name of a writing help book, I am trademarking it immediately.**


	3. Chapter 3

**AN: I really did not expect this to take... 9 months. Oops.**

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God Complex

 **Military Life**

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For some reason civilians always think Operation Orbs are made by aircraft manufactures.

I don't know of any real cause for this mistaken assumption beyond the average battlemages main job being flying, which is also done by planes.

For those who are still blissfully unaware even after my occasional rant on the subject on national television or never noticed the branding plastered all over modern orbs, they are in fact not manufactured by aero plane designers.

They are made by watch makers.

So, if you have ever wondered why a top-quality Operation Orb made for special forces costs as much as a Rolex, it's because the company making the orbs could have just made a Rolex for less time and resources. After all most watches are not made from solid platinum with titanium trimming and a uranium core.

Not to mention making watches rarely results in thermal runaway unless you are doing something incredibly stupid.

They are prohibitively expensive to be perfectly honest. Even including the fact that a handful of the highly trained craftsmen who make them accidentally disintegrate themselves and everything within a fifty-foot radius each year.

Damned communists using their unions to drive up prices.

Personally, I have always been a fan of Jaeger-LeCoultre Orbs. Mostly because it has "Jaeger" in the name.

Plus, they threw in one of their horrendously ugly watches with every Orb. Saved me the trouble of having to actually look for one.

Bastards did throw their lot in with the enemy though. Made it hard to find replacement parts unless I took a visit to a POW camp and traded a favor or something for one of the captured officers' watches.

Amazing what a few bars of chocolate will get you.

* * *

I never understood the complaints of my fellow recruits.

Over those first few weeks in the army training facility south of Berun the other recruits, most twice or more my age, seemed to do nothing but complain constantly. They spent hours each night exchanging complaints and the most pathetic tales of woe and misery.

"The food tastes horrible!" they would say during mealtimes. Letting the salt meat porage fall back onto their plate from their fork only to scoop up more over and over again.

It has not been stepped on, rotted, or spent any time in the garbage. What is there to complain about? If they didn't want their share, I was more than happy to take it off their hands.

"The beds are rock hard!" they would cry as we prepared for bed. Tossing and turning to find a comfortable way to lay in vain. Each night I would be lulled to sleep by the sound of them twisting and punching their paper thin pillows and paddings into shape.

The floor is harder. We are not curled up inside a cupboard stuffed with dirty rags and newspapers for insulation or sleeping under a tree covered in leaves because the bigs wouldn't let you back inside before sun set and the doors were locked for the night.

"The instructors are too harsh!" they would whisper amongst each other. None willing to raise their complaints in fear that one of the angry looking men would overhear.

But the instructors would only berate you if you did something wrong. They were teaching us what we needed to know to stay alive. Why would you not do whatever they say?

It got quite annoying to be honest.

I for one, was quite pleased with life in the military. The portions I was served were based on a fully-grown adult male, so I had as much food as I could cram down my gullet with some to spare. Even a third of the food they provided was more than I could expect on the best week living at the orphanage.

It was actually quite the problem for the first week or so. I wasn't at risk of refeeding syndrome specifically, but the foods were still far too rich for my malnourished body.

It was still delicious regardless of how many times it made me ill.

We even had genuine cream and sugar to put in our coffee. None of that powdered milk solids crap they switched to during the war.

Some of the recruits held a similar stance on the food to me. Mostly a rag tag bunch of refugees from Russy and a few street kids that enlisted when they came of age.

They complained less.

I liked them.

As much as I can like people at least.

There was also something inherently enjoyable about the regimented life in the military. It loosened up quite a bit over time as magic training became the bulk of our learning but I deeply enjoyed the way our days were strictly organized.

Wake up at exactly this time.

Five minutes to clean and get out of the barracks.

Physical training for the next few hours before sun comes up and we can go to the mess to eat.

Every minute accounted for. Nothing wasted, nothing lost in the shuffle.

We always knew exactly what we were doing next.

It was nice.

For someone who didn't have a constant place to sleep or steady access to food that kind of lifestyle was inherently appealing to me. Sure, I didn't necessarily _like_ waking up at 4:30 AM every day, but going to bed the previous night _knowing_ I would be waking up in exactly _x_ many hours was reassuring.

Maybe it was childish of me.

The other recruits certainly didn't like it.

If the food was my favorite part of military life PT was definitely my least favorite. The only consolation for the absolutely torturous training is that being 8 years old I couldn't do much of it.

Though I the trainers made up for it by yelling at me twice as loud whenever I began to flag on the runs. Never mind the fact that the training orb we were carrying around was 20 pounds, almost half of my total body weight. The damn thing was designed to be almost non-functional to prevent runaway cascading reactions and sturdy enough to take a direct hit from a panzer.

It wouldn't do for a mage in training to vaporize the barracks or something by mistake.

For the average trainee that wasn't too much of a problem. Mages don't do their PT in full kit like a normal soldier since our gear is entirely different from the ground up.

Of course, our standard gear includes a magical miracle device that allows us to reduce the weight of our gear, and ourselves, to a negative number and fly which kind of defeats the purpose of training at all to be honest.

The problems are only compounded by the outdated laws and regulations for training combat mages. The first combat mages were overwhelmingly members of the nobility and upper class that could afford (and were allowed) to learn how to use magic. The Junkers seemed to want the prestige and honor of serving in the nations armed forces without actually having to go through the difficulties involved.

Not that I was complaining of course. I still couldn't keep up with the lightened load.

In place of the strenuous physical training the others were required to go through I instead received more magical training either with instructors, or self-study from textbooks by myself.

The other recruits were split right down the middle between those who were envious of me, and those who pitied me having to slog through even more hours of complex magical mathematics and array theory. On one hand I didn't have to spend as much time getting demeaned by the instructors, but on the other hand I spend more time almost blowing myself up while trying to learn Applied Thaumaphysics.

The magic made everything worth it though. Every screamed insult from the sergeants. Each night lying in bed holding back tears as every muscle in my body burned in agony.

I would do any of it a thousand times over just for a single page from those books.

Every word on the page, every idea presented, all the concepts illustrated by the mages that came before me opened my mind. Upon first arriving I thought I had a grasp on what my magic was. How it worked, how to make it do what I wanted but by the end of the first page of those books I realized I was nothing more than an arrogant brat with delusions of grandeur.

So I soaked up every single word.

The teachers were surprised for some reason.

Perhaps they thought a measly child of eight would not be able to keep up with such subjects?

Mayhap they believed any reasonable person would grow tired after the fifth hour of study, or the ninth hour of practice?

The others did after all. After a measly hour they were fidgeting in their seats, looking for distractions. "What could possibly distract from this," I would always think, "how can they just leave class and laze around doing nothing?" By the time I was still getting started with my practical learning they were already getting ready to leave, and by the time I finished they were off drinking in the beerhalls.

I suppose it is unfair of me to judge. Magic was my passion after all. It was the spark fanned into a burning flame in my chest that gave me drive, gave me a purpose in life. Every waking moment was filled with it.

Whether I was studying, running, lying in bed ignoring my aches and pains, or shoving food in my face-hole I was thinking about magic. Flexing my metaphysical muscles inside of my body and trying to discern just a little bit _more_. Figure out just _one more_ detail of how the mysterious force works.

They didn't understand it. They thought I was gifted. That I was some kind of genius.

Is a baby bird a genius because it learns how to fly?

Are you surprised when a fish knows how to swim?

Then why are you surprised when Tanya Degurechaff uses magic?

* * *

 **Welcome to the bottom.**

 **Once again, sorry for the long delay. I actually wrote a few versions of this over time, but I didn't really like any of them so i just set it aside and basically forgot about it for a while. Ended up listening to a German version of the main Youjo Senki theme song today and busted this sucker out in a few hours while waiting to get sleepy.**

 **Well its been so long I have... well i never responded to reviews for this one. So i guess I can do all of them now.**

 **Deathstrokenator: Yeah it will be a pain to not make her a Mary Sue. I am currently planning on minimizing her abilities that arnt directly related to magic until moments later and try to show the thought process behind her decisions. Its not helped that if i were to follow the books/show/manga directly i would pretty much start with a time skip to halfway through the war where she is already competent and remove any buildup. Also i mainly come from the book side of things, so I have a few chapters of nonsense planned up north fighting the entente bastards before dealing with the Francois**

 **Lewascan2: Thank you. I really liked the idea of magical World War 1 that I really just want... magical world war 1 hahaha. The different mage types is a transplant from a story i wrote in high school just with like... 15 other superfluous types removed for convenience**

 **First Time Story Teller: To a degree. Her ambivalence towards religion will come up quite a few times, the main idea is once she starts facing Holy Mages from other countries, and starts winning against them, she will start getting a very inflated sense of self.**

 **Guest: Apparently my schedule was "Stop uploading for 9 months for some damn reason." There should be updates for Second Summer soon. And... fucking eventually a second chapter for Give it Your All.**

 **Final Fan: Yeah america going to be much more focused on the Americas to begin with until i get Japan involved. I'm going with the idea that the natives had magic too so they wernt hit as hard by the plagues and could fight back a little better.**

 **Inquisitor Sigvon Blackwolf: No. It was just suffocating in a closet somewhere.**

 **Anon: UPDATES. NOW.**

 **And thats just about everything!**

 **Sorry against for the delay. I can't believe i went so long without doing anything. I got way more distracted by my job then i would have ever expected.**


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